SOPHIE DELAPORTE – POSTMODERN MYSTERIES
2016-05-30Since the early 90s, when the artist would begin her formative and longstanding collaborations with cutting-edge British magazine I-D, Sophie Delaporte has remained dedicated to the “play” of photography and fashion in its most straightforward definition, emphasizing fun, freedom and theatricality. Yet Delaporte’s lighthearted view of the worlds she creates, in which women and men appear to happily vacillate between childhood and adulthood, are anything but straightforward. This immediately recognizable style of Delaporte—highly pictorial, and often employing lush color and sparkling humor— promises such multifaceted readings, that any sequence of images can be arranged and disarranged to pleasing effect: a dinner scene, framed in front of darkening windows and spotted with silverware that reflects the impossibly bright wine set in glass goblets, could be at once a poetical, beautiful meditation on the power of the woman in red at the head of this table, and also a charged scene from a contemporary iteration of Ubu Roi. “The mysteries are decidely postmodern,” writes Vicki Goldberg, “consisting of inexplicable actions, they involve no crime and have no solution other than anyone’s guess.” With an ever-refreshing perspective, along with the mastery of pretended improvisation and movement in a tightly controlled studio setting, Delaporte positions her work in the realm of surrealism, promising nothing but the surprise and delight of the imagination.
Opposite – Global Nonchalance, 2005
Exhibition runs through to June 11th, 2016
Sous Les Etoiles Gallery
560 Broadway #603
New York
NY 10012
